WITH the eurozone close to collapse, the British economy at a standstill and England s rugby representatives at the World Cup in disciplinary degradation, the best that the Conservative Party could come up with at its Conference's penultimate day was a spat over a cat between its two senior ministers with judicial responsibilities.
In this space yesterday I mentioned the disagreement between Home Secretary Theresa May and Justice Minister Kenneth Clarke over the Human Rights Act which Mrs May wants rid of and Mr Clarke is determined to keep. There are important issues to be debated on this subject but to see yesterday two ministers scrapping over whether an illegal immigrant could not be deported because his list of household effects included a cat was to wonder what on earth has happened to Mr Cameron's party.
When will ministers learn that it is always unwise to use human interest case histories to prove or disprove a point of policy? Yesterday a flurry of research into the cat case seemed to show that Mrs May or her advisers had misinterpreted the evidence and that the cat had played no part in the judgement that so incensed her. But was Mr Clarke's very public put-down of Mrs May quite what the Conservative Party wanted so soon after Mr Cameron's own apologies for his disrespectful remarks to women MPs?
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